Monday Bullets #2 (Hatake’s Numbers Edition)

Monday Bullets is a feature in which Tsubamegun writers (mostly Kozo) gather random news, thoughts, images, movies, etc. during the week and publish them for off day consumption.

I was looking at Hatake’s numbers on Monday and noticed that through 13 games Hatake’s batting average and his on-base percentage were identical. In other words, he had no walks, HBPs, sac bunts, or sac flies. Hatake managed to get his first walk of the season, an RBI bases loaded walk to take the lead, in Tuesdays game. The big man managed to draw four walks this week to bring his OBP to .386 to go with his .354 batting average. Looking at Hatake stat line it amazing how much he has managed to cut down on his strikeouts. So far this season he only has 5 strikeouts in 83 plate appearances. That’s 16.60 PA/K, last year Fludge went 5.70 PA/K. It looks like Hatake is emphasizing getting the bat on the ball rather than going for the big homerun. Watching him at the stadium and in highlights it looks like Hatake is just trying to get a bat on the ball rather than hit the ball perfectly. We’ll see how this holds up the rest of the season.

Team at start of week the Swallows’ team AVG and ERA were .298 and 6.06, respectively At the end of the week the numbers are .289 and 5.95. The offensive number is quite good until you realize that Swallows’ opponents are hitting .306 against the Swallows’ pitching. The Swallows offense currently has an OPS of .793, while their opponents have an .864 OPS against the Swallows. The offensive numbers are quite good and it’s hard to ask the offense to do much more, the key to turning the losing around is to get the pitching to settle down.

I looked at some farm numbers this week. The ni-gun Swallows are in a similar situation as their top team counterparts, great hitting but no pitching. The difference though is that the ni-gun Swallows are in second place in the Eastern League with a 13-10 record. Looking at the farm numbers most of the pitchers with good numbers have already been called up (Kiya, Sanada, Roman, Kyuko). Kenta Abe (2.70 ERA in 7 games) and Muranaka (0.00 ERA in 6 innings) are probably the only pitchers who might get a call based on the numbers. I haven’t dug deep into boxscores to see recent results to see if anyone with bad numbers have improved.

On offense, it looks like Araki, Hiyane, and Takanori Sato are all putting up good numbers in regular appearances in farm games. Araki and Sato have been consistently good on the farm over the last few years, there’s just no spot on the top team for either player. Sato is still an ikusei player but I assume that the team wouldn’t hesitate to sign him to a full contract if he was needed on the top team.

This week I realized that Shiroishi is no longer manning the third base coach’s box. Fukuchi is now the third base coach while Shiroishi is on the first base side.

Apparently the DH rule will flip flop during this year’s Interleague. This means that we’ll be see some hot (?) DH action at Jingu once Interleague starts at the end of May. It’s a low cost, low impact gimmick for which I’m indifferent.

Looking around the league it looks like many teams in the CL still have unresolved bullpen issues. The first place Carp look the most solid with Mickolio as their closer. In fact, the entire Carp staff is the reason why they are in first place with a 2.86 ERA that is over a full run below the next lowest team ERA.

After Yasuhiro Ogawa got hit with a comebacker on Friday the team initially kept him on the active roster in the hopes that it wouldn’t be too serious. Unfortunately it appears things are serious enough that they took him off the active roster yesterday. He was examined at a Tokyo hospital today and apparently he’ll need at least 6 weeks to fully recover from with broken bones in his hand.

If I had a gun to my head, I don’t know which active Swallows pitcher I’d choose to throw a scoreless inning with my life on the line. Based on last week’s games Yamamoto, Roman, or Sanada would probably be the guys, but I don’t trust any of them enough. With Ogawa out, I can’t even think of a starter to which I could entrust my life.

Apparently the Swallows will go with a 5-man rotation for the time being. Not sure whether our current roatation of pitchers will able to last without cracking. My best guess for potential call ups would be Matsuoka or Tokuyama. Possibly first round pick, Sugiura depending on his injury return schedule.

The Swallows need to pick it up so they can keep pace with the rest of the CL. They’re already 3.5 games behind the fourth place Dragons.

Kozo Ota is a third-generation Swallows fan that grew up on Montreal Expos baseball. (You can read more about that here.) When he’s not at Jingu, he works as a freelance translator/interpreter to make enough money to go to Jingu. You can find random posts by Kozo on Google+ and Twitter.

MooreyTokyo

Hello chaps, thanks for the Monday bullets. Given that my wife and I had twins 6 months ago, my baseball time has become rather limited and not expecting it to change too much too soon! Only been to jingu twice and I’m not even catching that much on TV, so appreciating the website more than ever. Monday bullets are great.

So, hope we can turn around the dodgy start. Without Ogawa for a month is only going to make things harder – not great.

Kozo, remind me please the youtube channel (?) where I can catch quick highlights? I’m sure there was something last season? I’d like to see the full scuffle from above 😉

Cheers,
James

Kozo

James,

Congrats on your twins! You’re doing a very important job raising the next generation of Swallows fans.

You can check out Central League highlights on the league’s official YouTube channel.http://www.youtube.com/user/CentralLeagueMovie
(This channel will have highlights of all CL home games except those hosted by the Giants and BayStars.)

You can see the scuffle clip here:

MooreyTokyo

Perfect, thanks Kozo.

Indeed, I cannot wait to get them down to Jingu sometime 😉

Hokkaido chocolate

As mentioned to Dave this is a great time to be having babies and raising kids. Hopefully when they grow up they’ll actually get to see some on field success. Meanwhile stay home and away from this travesty of a season so far 🙁